A history of developments
in the assigning of
domain names (1999-2000)

These developments in the naming of domains are presented in reverse
chronological order -- to see the events in the order they happened,
work upward from the bottom of this page. This material appeared in
slightly different form in the TBTF issues listed at the right.
[ See also
1999-present |
1998 |
1997-1996 ]

2000-04-19
Dot Republicans

House Republicans grab their own piece of domain
namespace

The US Republican party, currently in the majority in both houses of
Congress, has annexed a piece of domain-name space to which it has a
dubious claim. Longtime activist Jim Warren sent a note to several
mailing lists with word that the House Republican leadership has put
up a beta site at gop.gov.
(For international readers not steeped
in US political terminology: GOP, or Grand Old Party, is a synonom
for the Republicans.)

I read Warren's note and a followup on Matthew Gaylor's Freemat
list; since both seem to be missing from Gaylor's archive, I have
postedthem on the TBTF site.

I agree with Warren that a political party has no business
whatsoever holding a second-level .gov name. These names are intended for
official government functions, not for partisan organizations.

In a followup to the Freemat list, Richard Diamond from the
House Office of the Majority Leader offered a rationale for the
partisan use of the domain name.

So, yes, whether you like it or not "Republican" and
"Democrat" are part of the institution that is the U.S. Congress.
This top level domain reflects the institution. If the flat
earth society can get a majority in Congress, they can have
their own .gov -- but not until then.

I'm not buying it. It's disingenuous to imply that the Republican
party is a part of the government in the same way that, for example,
the FTC is. And it's cynical in the extreme to grab desirable real
estate in domain-name space just because you're the majority party,
and you can.

2000-03-31
ICANN in Cairo

An interlocking set of agreements removes some roadblocks stalling
domain-name reform

Harvard hosts a complete
summary of the naming group's recent quarterly meeting. with video and audio
from many of the sessions. ICANN had planned to hold arms-length elections for
its nine remaining board members, but
reversed
field under near-unanimous pressure from attendees. ICANN conceded to direct
elections for the first five board slots, after which they will examine how the
process has gone before filling the remaining four. The election date was put
back by a month to November 1. The Center for Democracy and Technology and
Common Cause
applauded
the decision; the groups had submitted a
report critical of ICANN's
election plan.

1999-12-16
NSI suspends its dispute-resolution policy

Old cases and suspended names to be revisited

Network Solutions has sent a letter to all parties who have requested
invocation of NSI's Domain Name Dispute Policy, informing them that
the policy will be superseded on 1 January 2000 by ICANN's new
Uniform Dispute
Resolution Policy. NSI will not begin any new proceedings
under the old DNDP.

Furthermore, according to the Fross Zelnick E-LEGAL Letter (not
archived on the Web), on 1 January NSI will reopen all previous
disputes that resulted in the suspension of a domain name under the old
policy. If by 1 April 2000 the parties to each of these disputes
have not informed NSI that the dispute has been resolved, the domain
names in question will be reactivated. NSI has not made clear
whether the names will be reactivated if within 90 days the parties
involved begin dispute resolution under the new UDRP.

1999-10-05
ICANN, NSI, Commerce kiss and make up

An interlocking set of agreements removes some roadblocks stalling
domain-name reform

The three parties have been wrangling over contractual terms for the
last year. Last week they announced a complex series of agreements
that resolve all of the issues outstanding among them, including
funding for ICANN's continuing operations. The best summary I've
found of the interlocking agreements is this fact sheet
[6]
on Commerce's site. The agreements could come into effect as early as
November, after ICANN takes public comment and ratifies them.

Highlights:

NSI assents to ICANN's authority and agrees to sign a modified
Registrar Agreement.

Commerce takes over operation of the InterNIC.

The fee NSI charges to competitive registrars drops from $9
to $6.

NSI agrees in principle to a per-name fee to fund ICANN's
operations, provided that NSI does not owe more than $2M
under such a program. NSI hands over $1.5M to ICANN
immediately.

NSI continues to run the authoritative root server for at
least four years. Even after its eventual transfer to ICANN,
Commerce continues to assert policy authority to direct this
server. (I wonder what the EU thinks of this provision.)

NSI must totally separate its registry and registrar
functions. If it accomplishes this within 18 months then it can
hold onto the root server for an additional four years.

NSI effectively gives up the claim that it owns the
intellectual property represented by the .com/.org/.net database.

With the contract fight behind them, ICANN
moved
forward with their
proposal for a uniform
policy for resolving disputes over domain names. Its main goals are
to render domain-name hoarding profitless and to remove most
disputes from the courts in favor of binding arbitration. ICANN will
take public comments
on the proposal until 13 October.

At the recent conference
"Governing the Commons:
The Future of Global Internet Administration", many participants
were critical of ICANN's attempts to establish Internet policy,
according to this account
written by Ted Byfield <tbyfield at panix dot com> for the
German magazine Telepolis. Byfield notes that ICANN has blown past
the already controversial proposals of the IAHC-gTLD-MoU-CORE
group which wanted to establish equitable dispute resolution
mechanisms. ICANN proposes a much stronger uniform dispute
resolution policy, drawing even more fire.

1999-08-30
ICANN's Santiago meeting

Doing business in the public eye, in relative harmony

Much of the acrimony of the previous
Berlin meeting
seemed to be
absent at Santiago. ICANN held its decision-making meeting in full
public view (for that fraction of the public that had managed to
travel to Chile, anyway); only some advisory committee meetings were
closed. ICANN's interim chair, Esther Dyson, participated in an
online chat session from one of those closed meetings. Its
transcript
provides a welcome human sidelight, typos and all, to the august
proceedings.

This ICANN
page
gives a bare listing of all of the
resolutions acted upon at Santiago. Today's NY Times
coverage
(free registration and cookies required) stresses the persistent complaint
that ICANN's process to date has taken most of its input from large
commercial organizations and governments, to the exclusion of
not-for-profit entities and individual Netizens.

At Santiago ICANN initiated the process of gathering a broad-based,
representative membership of at least 5,000 individuals, which will
elect half of ICANN's board members next year.

ICANN's other significant action was to approve draft rules to limit
cyber-squatting. In conciliation to individual domain-name owners,
ICANN directed a sub-panel to add new language protecting individuals
and others from losing legitimately registered domain names to large
companies.

1999-07-26
Domain naming news

Price war for domain names begins

CORE, the Council of Registrars, is one of the organizations
accredited in the early-phase testing of competitive domain-name
registration. One of CORE's members, CSL GmbH of Duesseldorf, is now
offeringtwo-year registrations in the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains
for 40.9 Euros, or about $43.23 CSL thus becomes the first
competitive registrar to actually compete on the basis of price. NSI
and all the other active test registrars still charge $70 for two
years -- but this won't be true for long. To register your .com
domain for less than the price of a .nu,
visit CSL's registration site
joker.com
(This is no joke.)

The Internet Commission on Assigned Names and Numbers issued a
ruling that will limit Network Solutions's influence on domain naming
policy. ICANN has
declared
that no entity may send more than a
single representative to the Names Council, a body set up to advise
ICANN on naming policy. Under the previous rules, NSI had 3 seats
on the 21-member council.

1999-07-26
House holds hearing on ICANN

To its surprise NSI gets roughed up, too

On Thursday 22 July a highly charged House subcommittee hearing
convened to scrutinize ICANN. The politicians ended up
taking
the dominant registrar to task as well. The House Commerce Subcommittee
on Oversight and Investigations addressed allegations that the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers had overstepped its
authority. This
news.com report
opines that ICANN's Esther Dyson
emerged relatively intact, while the new CEO of NSI, the monopolist
that had prompted the hearings, was battered and shaken.

David Post "attended" the hearing by RealAudio. He notes in an email
distributed on Declan McCullagh's Politech mailing list that the one
"smoking gun" to emerge came from ICANN's lawyer, Joe Sims. At the
hearing an email from Sims to the Department of Justice was made
public. Sims had "suggested" to DOJ that it intervene in ICANN's
negotiations with NSI and Commerce:

[O]ne thing DOJ could do is increase the level of pressure on
DOC, by some form of formal communication or a higher-level
contact... and that it would be useful for DOC to hear from
significant organization that they were perfectly willing and
capable of stepping into NSI's shoes with little difficulty,
assuming access to the root files.

1999-07-19
Domain naming developments

Commerce Department yanks ICANN's chain, backhands NSI

On 9 July the Commerce Department sent a 32-page
letter
to the ICANN board and the House Commerce Committee, responding to
committee chairman Tom Bliley's questions on ICANN's recent actions. Here
is coverage on this letter from
news.com.
and the
NY Times
(for the latter, free registration and cookies are required). Commerce Department
officials said that ICANN should

hold all meetings in public,

drop a proposed $1-per-domain-name fee until a permanent ICANN
board can vote on it, and

draw up binding contracts with domain-name services that would
bar ICANN from going beyond their mission.

Commerce did not let NSI entirely off the hook, either. While
chastising ICANN for a threat, issued in its Berlin meeting, to cancel
NSI's authority to issue domain names, the Commerce letter states
baldly that unless NSI signs ICANN's operating agreement, Commerce
will in fact terminate that authority. NSI must stop at once
claiming the .com, .net. and .org domain-name databases as their
intellectual property, Commerce insists.

Congress has now scheduled the investigative hearing promised by
Bliley. The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will
convene "Domain Name System Privatization: Is ICANN Out of Control?"
on Thursday, July 22, 1999 at 11:00 a.m. in the Rayburn House
Office Building, room 2322.

On 16 July Commerce again
extended
the deadline for the end of the open domain registration test. The test had
already been extended
once before
because of protracted wrangling among NSI, ICANN,
and the test registrars. The new target date for wider
participation in competitive registration is 6 August.

1999-07-08
Anything ICANN do

The long strange trip gets longer and stranger

The Internet Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers was expecting
its work, opening up to competition the process of assigning domain
names, to be a minefield. They weren't expecting, perhaps, the
snake-infested swamp or the barbed wire or the snipers or the high
invisible planes dropping bombs on them. ICANN accuses the domain naming
incumbent, Network Solutions, with fomenting trouble, in the form of
an open letter
from Ralph Nader and a Congressional
investigation (see below). NSI too has its problems, with an EU antitrust
investigation in the works (see below). Amid the acrimony and the
duelling press releases, a source of information and open discussion
has emerged. David Post, Michael Froomkin, and Dave Farber have
established ICANNWatch
to serve as a forum for informed debate about ICANN's role in managing
the Domain Name System. Post authored the essay cited in the
previous issue of TBTF
calling for a Net-era incarnation of the Federalist Papers. ICANNWatch bids to
fill this role.

Here are some of the recent developments in the domain-naming saga
that began with the International Ad Hoc Committee nearly three
years ago. This resource [no link -- it's the file you're reading]
includes every story on domain-naming policy that has appeared in
TBTF since before the IAHC was formed.

Test phase extended.
As the shared registration system test
neared its end date last month, only one of the initial five
alternate registrars (register.com) had managed to register any
domain names for the public. The others, after long wrangling
with Network Solutions over terms of the agreement NSI required
before it would grant access to its registry, finally were ready
to begin as the test ended. The Commerce Department brokered a
last-minute deal
extending the test by three weeks. So far,
so typical of a beta test in this industry. (Note this effect of
the test: NSI's whois server no longer contains all of the .com
names. GeekTools provides an
alternate interface to whois
that works no matter who registered the name. It also works for
country-code domains as well as many TLDs.)

Stalemate looms.
NSI and ICANN have each
signed a cooperative
agreement with the US government, but not yet with each other
NSI threatens not to recognize ICANN's authority to manage
the process of granting domain names, though its obligation to do
so appears to be fully spelled out in
Amendment 11
to the contract with the US government signed by NSI last fall. If NSI
does not sign ICANN's accreditation agreement by the time the
test phase ends, on 1999-07-16, ICANN may
decide
that the company cannot participate further in the granting of domain
names. NSI shareholders would not be best pleased.

Congress probes ICANN.
On 22 June Rep. Thomas Bliley, the
chairman of the House Commerce Committee, issued a
blistering attack
against ICANN and opened an investigation into its actions.
The crux of his complaint is that ICANN may have exceeded its
authority when it decided to fund its operations by assessing a
fee of $1 per domain name granted. ICANN says it will cooperate
with any investigation, and blames NSI for setting Bliley upon
them.

EU probes NSI.
The European Union is
investigating
whether a Network Solutions contract for new registrars violates
Continental antitrust laws. NSI might be forgiven for wondering
whether CORE whispered in the ear of EU staffers. The Council of
Registrars is based Europe (though in Switzerland, not in an EU country).
Besides being one of the five designated testers of open registration,
CORE was the end-point of the IAHC process.
As such it had gained broad
international credibility -- bluntly, Europeans believed that CORE was
not totally captive to US interests. In this light ICANN is
viewed from Europe with considerably more suspicion.

Moving the root.
ICANN is working on a plan to
move the A root
server -- the base of the domain name system -- from NSI's premises to California
NSI is obliged under its contract to
give over responsibility for the A server when so instructed by
the Commerce Department.

New accreditations.
On 1999-07-07 ICANN blessed
15 new organizations
to act as registrars when the process is opened up
beyond the initial testers. In all 57 organizations have received
accreditation to date. NSI is not among them.

NSI is cracked.
On 2 July crackers redirected traffic intended for
Network Solutions to the sites of CORE and ICANN
(the NY Times coverage
requires cookies and free login; that from
news.com
doesn't). Early reports claimed that
the unexpected traffic brought down ICANN's servers as well. The
FBI was investigating an ISP, SoftAware, that happens to be housed
in the same building as ICANN. SoftAware said in a
press release
that it is cooperating fully.

ICANN is going broke.
Because NSI has not agreed to pay the
$1-per-name fee that ICANN's accreditation agreement requires, the
nonprofit organization is on the verge of
bankruptcy.
The president of an ISP trade group said, "To fail because of politics
would be one thing, but to fail because of money would be a
catastrophe."

1999-06-14
A report from ICANN's Berlin meeting

Country-code representatives are only one of the unhappy
constituencies

Newly minted TBTF Irregular Ant Brooks
<ant at hivemind dot net>
travelled to Berlin for the ICANN meeting in late May as the
representative for the .za country code, and sent TBTF
this report.
Brooks asks that we read it as an attempt to express his personal
views of the proceedings, and nothing more.

In an unfortunate coincidence of timing, by leaving South Africa
for Berlin, Brooks forfeited his right to vote in his country's
second free election.

The wake of the Berlin meeting swirls with
controversy
over the way ICANN is carrying out its mandate
(free registration and cookies
required for this site). In this
critical
article David G. Post invokes the
shade of US founding father James Madison, one of the authors of the
Federalist Papers. Post says we need to start a community dialogue --
call it the Netalist Papers if you must -- to define the governance
we want for cyberspace.

Consumer advocates Ralph Nader and James Love sent an
open letter
to ICANN chair Esther Dyson asking her to clarify the
organization's stance on the issues raised by critics. No reply so far.

Note added 1999-06-17:
Dyson has replied
to the Nader/Love letter, and the response is a warhead targeted at
Network Solutions.
Its tone is so blunt that the techie press, smelling blood in the water,
has given it fairly wide coverage; here's an
example.

1999-05-22
ICANN increasingly under fire

Complaints are building about the way ICANN, the organization tasked
with guiding Internet naming and numbering from government to
private oversight, is pursuing its charter. This Telepolis
article
summarizes some of the concerns. Here are three separate
controversies that have arisen in recent days in advance of ICANN's next
meeting in Berlin, scheduled for 26 May.

A number of domain-name activists have
petitioned
ICANN and the US Department of Commerce protesting ICANN's
intention to consider, at the Berlin meeting, a trademark
resolution
report
from the World Intellectual Property
Organization. The petition argues that ICANN's charter gives
it no power to implement such a far-reaching power shift as
the WIPO proposal calls for; the current unelected ICANN
members are supposed to limit themselves to the transition
to a permanent ICANN with elected representation. Here is a
response
from the US Small Business Administration to
the petition, and here are WIPO representative Michael
Froomkin's
comments
on the final WIPO report.

Recently Ellen Rony, coauthor of The Domain Name Handbook and
one of the signatories to the
WIPO report,
posted a
note
requesting that ICANN make stronger provisions for input and
participation via the Internet, instead of answering all critics with
the less-than-helpful (and quite expensive) suggestion that
they come to Berlin.

The people who run the country-code top-level domains around
the world are unhappy with ICANN for a variety of reasons.
One of the principals of Adams Names, which handles
registration for five island ccTLDs, posted a note to the wwTLD
mailing list (not online as far as I have been able to
discover) detailing how the official representative from the
Turks and Caicos Islands was denied admission to the
Berlin ICANN meeting on the grounds that T & C is not a country,
but a colony. (The islands are in fact a British Overseas
Territory with their own democratically elected government.)
Ant Brooks <ant at hivemind dot com> sent this
summary
of the ccTLD community's complaints with ICANN; it is posted
on the TBTF archive by permission.

1999-04-21
At long last, domain-name competition

AOL, four others to participate in competitive testbed

On 21 April ICANN
announced
the first five companies selected
to provide domain-name registration services in competition with
Network Solutions, Inc. The initial five registrars will be:

America Online

CORE (Internet Council of Registrars)

France Telecom/Oleane

Melbourne IT

register.com

These five new registrars will open up for business on 26 April,
and after a 2-month test registration will be opened up to any
organization that meets ICANN's criteria (so far 29 additional
organizations have qualified). Here's Dan Goodin's
look
at whether, when registration is opened to new players, some animals
will be more equal than others.

1999-03-26
NSI's power grab

The Net's second most-beloved monopolist makes its move

Once there was a free and useful site called the InterNIC --
originally a US government project, the Internet Network Information
Center. ISPs around the world used it daily, by hand and via automated
tools, to check on names using whois and to access domain name
registration forms. The InterNIC was run by the current monopolist in
the granting of domain names, Network Solutions Inc.

Over the weekend of March 20-21, NSI made the InterNIC site go away.
They redirected "internic.net" to point to the NSI corporate site.
Need To Know
points out that NSI sued Eugene Kashpureff in 1997
over a not dissimilar act of
Net hijacking.

At its meeting in Singapore earlier this month, ICANN -- the agency
chartered with privatizing domain naming and numbering --
established
rules and a
timetable for opening domain-name
registration to five new competitors. NSI must open its databases to new
registrars on April 26.

In recent months NSI has mounted an advertising campaign calling
itself "the dot com company." (Do not confuse with Sun Microsystems,
who "put the dot in dot com.") Last week NSI took more technical
steps to cement its central position once competition arrives. The
moves generated a storm of protest from ISPs and network operators,
as well as from potential competitors. When NSI unveiled a new Web
site and new services and redirected "internic.net" to point there,
would-be competitors
cried foul
and complained to the US
Commerce Department, which historically has overseen NSI's contract.
Their complaint is that the term "internic" now means "domain name
registration" to a great many people around the world (NSI would
probably agree with that) and that the name should not devolve to
the monopolist incumbent.

Here's what NSI did, apparently, over the previous weekend.

Redirected the name "www.internic.net" to resolve to
"www.networksolutions.com".

Choked down telnet access to rs.internic.net. Saying "telnet
rs.internic.net," which used to allow you unlimited requests in
an interactive session, now returns "This service is no longer
available. Please use http://www.networksolutions.com". If you
specify telnet port "nicname" you can issue a single query,
however. Type quickly: the connection times out in a few
seconds.

Changed the URL for direct access to the 'whois' query CGI,
without notice or warning. A
query
that worked last week now returns "Your client does not have permission to
access the requested item."
This one
works.

Closed the loophole noted in
TBTF for 1999-03-01
that allowed you to retrieve creation date information on domain names.

NSI's troubles are mounting. Yesterday Asensio & Company, a member
of the National Association of Securities Dealers, issued a
press release
titled NSOL Possesses No Lock on Domain Registry or Registrar Businesses.
It begins:

Investors may be buying Network Solutions, Inc.'s (Nasdaq:
NSOL) stock believing the company possesses some market
advantage, recurring income or proprietary technology that
has allowed it to create, and will allow it to grow, its
Internet domain name registry and registrar business. We
found no reasonable basis for these beliefs. NSOL's domain
name business has been and remains totally reliant on a
7-year-old U.S. federal government contract, which is expiring
and will not be renewed. We believe that NSOL's management
has purposely disseminated misleading information, and failed
to disclose material negative information, that has led
investors to believe that the expiration of this contract will
be postponed or that it cannot be entirely and easily
terminated. Investors have also been led to believe that even
if the contract is terminated, NSOL's business value will
continue to grow. These expectations are baseless and false.

Note added 1999-03-30:
NSI now claims
that the whois database, assembled under the US Government-funded InterNIC project
since 1993, is its proprietary property.

This story
notes that the government owns the trademark on the term "InterNIC." How fast
can the Commerce Department move on a trademark lawsuit?

Following Asensio's short-sell report cited above, NSI's share price plummeted
more than $52 over the past week to close on Friday above $106.

1999-03-01
The database that NSI forgot

Want data on domain-name creation dates? Act quick

TBTF for 1999-02-01
noted that Network Solutions has stopped
providing the "date created" field for domain names in whois
queries. Recently the E-LEGAL email newsletter from the law firm of
Fross Zelnick Lehrman & Zissu, P.C.
(subscribe here)
carried
timely news of a database that NSI seems to have forgotten. Enter
at this
query screen
and you can still get creation-date
information -- for the moment.